Friday, March 22, 2013

On the Business of Literature

Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not
quite a proxy for the “business of literature.” Current accounts of
publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the
presumption is that if we lose publishing, we lose good books. Yet what
we have right now is a system that produces great literature in spite of
itself. We have come to believe that the taste-making,
genius-discerning editorial activity attached to the selection,
packaging, printing, and distribution of books to retailers is central
to the value of literature. We believe it protects us from the shameful
indulgence of too many books by insisting on a rigorous, abstemious
diet. Critiques of publishing often focus on its corporate or capitalist
nature, arguing that the profit motive retards decisions that would
otherwise be based on pure literary merit. But capitalism per se and the
market forces that both animate and pre-suppose it aren’t the problem.
They are, in fact, what brought literature and the author into being.

The story of the book as technology—the book as revolutionary,
disruptive technology—must be told honestly, without triumphalism or
defeatism, without hope, without despair, just as Isak Dinesen
admonished us to write. A great challenge in producing such an account,
however, is the “availability heuristic.” This is a model of cognitive
psychology first proposed in 1973 by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and
his colleague Amos Tversky, which describes how humans make decisions
based on information that is relatively easy to recall. The things that
we easily recall are things that happen frequently, and so making
decisions based on the samples we have at hand would seem to make sense.
The sun rises every day; we infer from this that the sun rises every
day. A turkey is fed every day; it infers that it will be fed every
day—until, suddenly, it isn’t. Heuristics are great until they aren’t. A
person sees several news stories of cats leaping out of tall trees and
surviving, so he believes that cats must be robust to long falls. These
kinds of news reports are far more prevalent than ones where a cat falls
to its death, which is the more common event. But since it is less
reported on, it is not readily available to a person for him to make
judgments.